Cannery Workers’ Shacks in Monterey, California

Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, California, became known as “Cannery Row” after the 1945 John Steinbeck novel of the same name.  From 1902 to the mid-1950’s, Cannery Row was the epicenter of the sardine canning industry and home to more than 30 canneries and marine docks.   At their peak, the canneries employed up to 4,000 people, and Monterey was known as “The Sardine Capital of the World.” Following World War II, the Monterey sardine industry collapsed due to overfishing and environmental changes that affected sardine life cycles.

Monterey required plentiful, nearby housing for the workers employed by the canneries.  Cannery owners built hundreds of single-room wooden shacks on the waterfront to house the primarily immigrant workforce.  These buildings are long gone, but the City of Monterey preserved three.  The furnishings of each Shack represent one of three prominent ethnic groups that worked in the canneries — Filipino, Japanese, and Spanish.

The Workers’ Shacks were in a section of the Row known as the “Chicken Walk,” where embedded planks served as steps up to the houses.  Onlookers compared people navigating the plank steps to chickens climbing ladders into chicken coops.  The City moved the display Shacks to Bruce Ariss Way, where they sit directly across from the Pacific Biological Laboratory, once owned by marine biologist Ed Ricketts, immortalized as “Doc” in Steinbeck’s novels.

The units were single-story, one-room buildings constructed from wood planks with board-and-batten siding and wood shingle roofs.  Each cottage had a tiny kitchen area with running water, electricity, and natural gas.  The spartanly furnished houses came with small tables and iron bedsteads.

Cannery workers made as little as 35 cents an hour.  Housing was scarce and expensive, so as many as four people occupied a single unit.  Because the sardine run was seasonal, many cannery workers left Monterey in February to pick fruits and vegetables or work in the Alaskan salmon canneries.

One by one, the canneries closed, and the workers moved on.  The famous Hovden Cannery shut down in 1973, and its building became the world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium.  Once, when asked where all the sardines had gone, Doc Ricketts replied, “They’re in cans.” The three workers’ shacks remain as a reminder of a significant period in California’s fishing industry.